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Friday, December 14, 2012

Twenty-first Century Sex (1997)

http://www.judygreenway.org.uk/21stcenturysex/21stcenturysex.html

by Judy Greenway
This is an unedited version of a chapter in Twenty-first Century Anarchism: Unorthodox Ideas for a New Millennium, edited by Jon Purkis and James Bowen. Cassell [now Continuum Books],
London, 1997, pp.170-180.

Introduction

What is sexual freedom? If anarchism has anything to offer for the
twenty-first century, it has to begin rethinking this question. New ways
of thinking about sexuality in recent years have emerged not so much
from anarchist theorists, many of whom are stuck in the sixties as far
as thinking (or fantasizing) about sex goes, as from the women's and gay
and lesbian liberation movements, and their successor issue-based
campaigns. Today, new sexual and social movements proliferate. The
direct action and spectacular demonstrations of AIDS activists, Lesbian
Avengers, Outrage, feminists for and against pornography, catch the
headlines, while postmodern feminists and Queer theorists join science
fiction authors and song-writers in speculation about the transcending
of gender and sexual categories. Developments in biotechnology and
virtual reality pose difficult questions about how we under-stand the
boundaries and limitations of our bodies.
In this article I will look at some underlying implications of
different approaches to sex and the body, and question whether new
theories and new technologies pose a real challenge to existing power
relationships. Will twenty-first century sex really be different?

True Natures

One night at a party in the nineteen-sixties, I was trapped against a
wall by a drunken member of my local anarchist group. As I pushed him
off me, he said bitterly, 'Call yourself an anarchist?' This attitude
that sexual freedom meant women on demand was one of the factors
propelling many of us a few years later into the first Women's
Liberation groups, where we were able to begin formulating demands on
our own terms. There is a long history of association between anarchism
and sexual freedom, but sexual freedom means different things to
different people at different times, and has complex connections to
ideas about nature, bodies, gender, power, and social organisation. The
concept of freedom, though it can seem like an absolute, is shaped by
specific social experiences of constraint.
Although many anarchists have led entirely conventional sexual lives,
a theory which rejects authority implies at the least a rejection of
formal marriage, seen as State/religious interference in human
relationships. Critics of anarchism have always claimed it would mean
sexual licence, the absence of restraint, shameless women and
irresponsible men indulging every passing lust. In such images, which
mingle fascination and disgust, sexual order and political order are
tied (or handcuffed) together. Some anarchists, particularly women and
gay men, have also linked sexual and political order, using the language
of equality, reciprocity, autonomy and democracy to develop a critique
of power relationships between men and women and to try and work out a
practice of everyday anarchism.
For well over a century, such anarchists have been criticizing
marriage and experimenting with alternatives. They have focused on
economic, household and childrearing arrangements — how best to
structure personal relationships. Underlying much of the discussion,
however, is a model of an instinctive self, repressed by social
convention. Love, passion, and sexuality are understood as natural
feelings which should ideally be unconstrained. Our natural selves are
repressed and distorted by social restrictions, both external and
internalized, so sexual freedom is not just freedom from church or state
intervention, but is about self expression, liberating our true
natures. Such ideas have led some anarchists to be among the pioneers
for sexual education, for birth control and for the acceptance of sexual
diversity, including homosexuality.
In the years since World War Two, these things, though still
controversial, have become part of the mainstream of most Western
cultures. Sex, love, and childbearing — never as securely tied to
marriage as they were meant to be — have become increasingly
deinstitutionalised. Serial monogamy is commonplace. Sexual pleasure as a
basic human need is taken for granted, and every woman's magazine gives
advice on how to achieve it. Postwar contraceptive technologies,
particularly the Pill, are claimed to have separated sex from
reproduction, making sexual liberation possible for heterosexual women.
Although the rhetoric of sexual libertarianism is no longer as popular
as it was, the imagery of sexual transgression has become a marketing
cliché. The explanation for these changes may lie in demographic and
economic shifts and complex social developments, but the way in which
they are widely understood and debated is still in terms of natural
sexualities.

Leaving the Twentieth Century: Sexual Anarchies

…
we have decided to take up the struggle against capitalist oppression
where it is most deeply rooted — in the quick of our body. It is the
space of the body, with all the desires that it produces, that we want
to liberate from the occupying forces ... 'Revolutionary consciousness'
is a mystification so long as it doesn't pass through the revolutionary
body, the body which produces the conditions of its own liberation.
It's women in revolt against male power — implanted for centuries in
their own bodies; homosexuals in revolt against terroristic normality;
the young in revolt against the pathological authority of adults. [
Wicked Messengers ]

In the new social and sexual movements of the late twentieth century,
with their creative confusion of debate and activity, sexual politics
and sex-as-politics are taken for granted; the meanings of sex and
politics are not. I want to argue that strategies of visibility,
transgression, prefiguration and transformation are key, but
problematic, aspects of both theory and practice around sexuality and
the politics of the body.

Visibility

A politics of visibility raises questions about what is taken for
granted and what is missing from the social picture, and about how that
picture is constructed. In 1969, the Miss World competition in London
was disrupted by Mis-Conception, Mis-Placed and Mis-Fit women. For a
while the term 'sex object' became part of everyday language, and the
organisers of beauty contests went on the defensive. In smudgily
duplicated pamphlets, French Situationist theories — or at least slogans
— were recycled in debates about women both as consumers of the
spectacle and as spectacular consumables.
‘We’re here, we’re queer, and we’re not going shopping’ went the
chant on one of the earliest British Gay Liberation marches down
London’s Oxford Street in the late 1970s. A small contingent of drag
queens teetered into Selfridges, to shock not to shop. (Now to be queer
is to go shopping, if the rise of gay consumer culture is anything to go
by). Some fifteen years later, gay activist group Outrage was
disrupting church services to denounce religious hypocrisy. In the USA,
fire-eating Lesbian Avengers rode into town on motorbikes, while their
tamer British counterparts made themselves noticed by riding around on
top of a bus with balloons. In such actions, visibility is in itself
political, asserting the presence of what has usually been rendered
invisible, disrupting the spectacle of normality. Today, when every soap
opera has its lesbian or gay characters, it seems that after decades of
activism, lesbians and gays have succeeded in making themselves visible
within the mainstream (however temporarily). The debate now is about
the range of representations and how these have been shaped for a
(presumed) heterosexual audience. When a tiny segment of urban lesbian
and gays are cast by advertising executives as style leaders, their
images used to sell ballgowns and spirits, jeans and perfume, they are
not disrupting the spectacle but becoming one.
Making a spectacle of themselves has been on the agenda as a means of
empowerment for successive generations of young women, too. Material
Girl Madonna may just be playing with conventionally pornographic images
of the sexual woman, but from Seventies Punk to the Riot Grrls, in
music, comics, and the informal theatre of the streets and clubs,
traditional notions of femininity and female sexuality have been
challenged and rejected. Not just attitude, but Bad Attitude; being
good or nice is now the fate worse than death. Often moralistic
feminists are cast along with straight society as the enemies of sexual
self expression, while feminists against censorship represent themselves
as a sexual vanguard, and pornography as a site to be reclaimed by
women. The full debate about what constitutes pornography and its
effects is too complex to enter into here. But feminist critiques of
sexual libertarianism are not necessarily anti-sexual or pro-censorship;
they can be about trying to transform the power relationships involved,
making those visible. Anarchist feminist activists, like USA’s Nikki
Craft and the Outlaws for Social Responsibility, argue:

Sex is not obscene. The real obscenity is the marketing of women as
products ... We are in favour of nudity and sensuality … There is a
difference between a genuine love, acceptance and empowerment of the
body, and the marketing of women and exploitation of women that is the
trademark of pornography … We advocate and commit civil disobedience …

Silence = Death

Dissent from mainstream representations of the body, sexuality and
gender, through direct action and the creation of alternative
representations, has also been an important part of AIDS activism, which
particularly in the USA has emphasised the importance of visibility and
participation for those affected by AIDS and HIV. As well as challenges
to the medical and scientific research establishments, health education
work by activist groups has given a new urgency to debates about sexual
identities and definitions.

But what is it, exactly, that has been invisible, Mis-Represented,
silenced? When the Situationists painted ‘Speak your desires’ on Paris
walls, when the women’s health movement brought out ‘Our Bodies,
Ourselves’, when gays and lesbians chanted, ‘2-4-6-8, Is your
girlfriend really straight?’, the implication was that there are genuine
desires, natural bodies, true sexualities, to be revealed and asserted
against the repression, misconceptions and misconstructions of an
oppressive society. When lesbians abseiled into the House of Lords, or
people with AIDS invaded medical conferences and demanded to speak from
the platform, they may have been, as Simon Watney says, constructing ‘an
effective theatre of images … seducing the voyeuristic mass media,
invading "public" space’; they were also publicly claiming an identity.
For all the intensive debates among feminists and Queer theorists about
the shortcomings of identity politics, and the discussions in academic
circles about Foucault’s argument that there is no inner sexuality or
true self to be discovered, the old ideas persist. Can there be a vision
of liberation if there is nothing there to be liberated?

Transgression

Transgression, the deliberate and visible breaking of social rules, also
raises difficult questions for a politics of sexuality. The boundary
between public and private, constantly being renegotiated, and central
to liberal sex reforms, seems to be under attack from the new generation
of ‘in your face’ sexual libertarians claiming the right to do what
they want where they want. At its simplest, transgressive sexual
behaviour or appearance is seen as important for its shock value — the
old game of scandalising the bourgeoisie. But shock can become its own
value, requiring a constant supply of shockees. If one thing becomes
acceptable, then a new unacceptability has to be found. This use of
transgression depends on its opposition to existing values, so cannot be
about broad social change, even though it may result in changing the
boundaries of permissibility (e.g. the mainstreaming of images formerly
confined to top-shelf pornography). Transgression in this sense is about
the pleasure of self-expression — a self which is defined by its
differentiation from a dominant other. For instance in a recent
interview, lesbian photographer Della Grace talks about how her images
explore our fear of otherness (who is the ‘our’ here?), then goes on to
tell of an encounter with a hostile neighbour who was:

… very upset that I was in the garden photographing three naked,
scarred, bald tattooed and pierced dykes … Afterwards I was, like, shave
me. I needed to have my head completely bald. I didn’t want to be
associated with her brand of normalcy.

Even when sexual transgression seems to be about creating new versions
of sexuality, the language of the true inner self recurs. Speaking our
desires is seen as revealing an inner truth, with assertions that take
the form: this is who I really am, and this is how I will live it out.
Sometimes, for instance in the debates around the limits of consensual
sado-masochism, its defenders use the traditional rhetoric of civil
liberties, maintaining the public/private distinction. Other groups and
individuals reject the notion of tolerance, and demand more (for
instance the right to public sex, or self-mutilation): see me; accept
me; make it possible for me to live out my desires; realise your own.

It is the space of the body that we want to liberate from the occupying
forces. It is in this way that we want to work for the liberation of
social space: there is no frontier between the two.
- Wicked Messengers

Transgression can work in a more complex way, using disruption, a
version of the Situationist détournement , with the aim of rendering
visible to both participants and observers power relations which are
normally hidden. When Nikki Craft was arrested in 1981 for exposing her
breasts on a beach, and supporters demonstrated topless outside the
courtroom, she argued:

We’re living in a society that sells women’s breasts in topless bars, in
advertising and pornography, and then attempts at the same time to deny
them rights over their own bodies. I wish women would demand control at
every level.

In England in the mid 1990s a woman who tries to breast feed her baby in
public can still be abused on buses or asked to leave a restaurant.
Where does this fit on the spectrum of normality and transgression?

Prefiguration

Prefiguration, the demonstration or rehearsal or sample of how life
could be in a better world is usually but not always transgressive.
Often it is about experimenting with different ways of living, from the
anarchist colonies of the late nineteenth century and the communes of
the nineteen-sixties and seventies, to the New Age travelers of the
nineteen-nineties. Attempts are made, with varying degrees of success,
to challenge dominant forms of sexual relationship. Non-monogamy, serial
monogamy, anonymous sex, celibacy, polymorphous perversity have all at
some point been argued for as ways of breaking down internalised
oppression and relating to one another in a non-capitalist and/or
non-patriarchal manner. The importance of friendship has been asserted
over the isolation of coupledom, and the chosen family replaces blood
ties. The stereotypical lone mothers and lonely homosexuals who serve as
warnings to those who live outside conventional family structures may
have support networks unimaginable to those who have not had to create
their own communities.
Whether sexuality can be the basis for rather than an aspect of
community has been a central debate for lesbian and gay activists. Most
recently, originating in the USA and drawing on rhetoric from Third
World nationalism, the concept of a Queer Nation has been used in
attempts to draw together groups of sexual outsiders, men and women,
black and white, gay and non-gay (but definitely not straight), in an
inclusive movement. The language of nationalism is one most anarchists
would reject as rooted in a history of definition through exclusion and
domination. However, the idea of an imagined community based less on
shared identity than on shared oppression, or sexual otherness, has more
to offer. In particular, it makes possible the move from organisation
based on affinity groups, to the development of coalitions, working with
difference rather than by separation. How far this is really
prefigurative is questionable however: a community based on shared
oppression may come to need oppression in order to maintain its
identity. An emphasis on difference and diversity may end up fossilising
the sexual/social categories of a particular moment in time, (see some
equal opportunities checklists for examples). And the celebration of
difference can obscure inequalities in power, which is a major reason
why it is so hard for groups like Queer Nation to sustain themselves
over time. What can be prefigurative, however, is not the specific
composition of particular communities or organisations, but the creative
attempt to live and work in new ways; the process rather than the
result. (Seeing it like this can also undercut the pessimism that often
follows painful failures).

Transformation

Prefiguration is about more than making a safe space for yourself
(important though that is). Both the disruptions of transgression and
the experimentation of prefiguration can be part of an attempt to
transform a whole society. Whether or not sexuality and sexual
relationships are seen as central to social change, they must be part of
it. It is easy to see (after many illustrative failures of attempts to
live a new life) how both external factors such as economic insecurity
and internal ones such as emotional insecurity help to reinforce the
sexual status quo. Rather than leading to pessimism, these connections
can inspire attempts to rethink the ways in which change is possible.
Although single issue campaigns focusing on legislation around the body
and sexual behaviour are to that extent reformist, they generate new
constituencies, and enable new and more radical questions to be raised
about sex, society, and the state. The conflicts and contradictions of
campaigns aimed at a broader notion of sexual liberation allow difficult
questions to be asked about the shaping of our desires and fantasies,
and the extent to which they can be separated from the society which
produces them.

Imagining the Twenty-first Century

Chaos: the order of the day

Postmodernist theory, making its breakthrough from academic
subculture to style magazines, claims to challenge the idea of
authoritative forms of knowledge, and rejects traditional ways of
understanding and explaining the world, or even the possibility of doing
so. Although it puts anarchism as a world view in the dustbin of
history along with every other ism (except postmodern/ism - perhaps best
seen as itself the dustbin), the rejection of hierarchy and authority,
the emphasis on diversity can be seen as anarchism under an alias:
theoretical outlawry. The association between anarchism and chaos, which
has so often been a source of irritation and disavowal for anarchists,
becomes a virtue when chaos theory is proposed on T-shirts and greeting
cards as a paradigm of post-modern life. If anarchism can after all be
thought of as an approach, a critique, a set of questions to be asked
about power relations, rather than a theory or set of answers, then
perhaps it can escape the fate of yesterday’s discarded ideologies.

Postmodern Bodies and Sexualities

In postmodernist rhetoric, fixed identities become fluid, boundaries
dissolve, fragmentation replaces illusions of wholeness, nothing is
natural and everything is constructed. If ideas about human nature no
longer seem an adequate basis for discussing sexual and social
possibilities, the approach of the twenty-first century has seen
dramatic changes in ways of understanding the body. If the Pill made sex
possible without reproduction, new reproductive technologies are making
reproduction possible without sex. If woman’s body has been
conceptualised by traditionalists and by many feminist theorists as
reproductive body, what happens when that link is broken? Will there be
‘women’ in the twenty-first century? Or ‘men’? (Are men conceptualised
in bodily terms in the same way as women?) Medical technologies seem to
promise the deconstruction and reconstruction of bodies , genders,
sexualities, which appear at the same time utterly interwoven and yet
capable of separation. In terms of bodily transformation, sex-change
surgery was only a start; now the taking of hormones to produce what
some proponents describe as a third sex, or the use of plastic surgery
as a radical aesthetic statement suggest the limitless possibilities of
high technology. Orlan, the French performance artist who broadcasts the
surgical transformation of her body on live video link says:

The body itself is an object for redesign. It is redundant, failing to
meet the demands of the modern world My work raises questions about its
status in our society and the future for coming generations.

The body is conceptualised as matter, as personal property to be
remodeled. Not just by medical professionals — there is a thriving
do-it-yourself and artisanal culture as well, of bodybuilding, tattooing
and piercing, while therapists provide the interior redesign.
Recent developments in genetics and biotechnology, not just the crossing
of species to create new kinds of animals, or the exchange of human
with non-human genes, but the very idea of biological engineering and
genetic recombination pose new challenges to the boundaries between
humans and other animals. Meanwhile, cyborg theorists claim that the
human/machine distinction is finally on its way out with the latest
developments in information technology. Orlan again:

Why should our bodies start or end at the skin? On a computer network
there is no ultimate distinction between the human and mechanical
components. The Cartesian mind/body, machine/organism,
male/female/life/death distinctions are meaningless … in cyberspace. We
are all hybrids, mosaics, chimaeras.

In this scenario, your grandmother’s pacemaker or hearing aid makes her a
cyborg without knowing it, using technology to overcome bodily
limitations. Her grandchildren are already beginning to be conscious
cyborgs, welcoming the dissolution of boundaries in a world without
limits. And sex? In Sadie Plant’s story ‘Cybersex’ she writes:
… the telecom’s revolution is accompanied by a sexual revolution that is
making old style masculinity increasingly obsolete. To be sure, this is
a quieter change than the great ‘liberation’ of the 1960s, but only
because it is more widespread, diffuser, diverse, and so difficult to
name and define. ‘Queer’ is one way of putting it, but even this has
limits when dealing with 1990’s galaxy of explorations of sexuality and
experiments with — and beyond sex. Dance and drugs began to rival the
sexual experience altogether, and there were years of lesbian chic,
fashionable S&M and a widespread interest in piercing and tattooing
all of which contributed to a new willingness to experiment with the
human organism and what it can do and feel. Normality became obsolete.
And if normality is obsolete, transgression becomes the new normality.
Does this kind of theorising challenge or transform existing power
relations, or does it mask them with yet another fantasy of power and
control?

Postfeminism and Postanarchism?

Fantasy and Cyberspace

What is missing from visions like these is any sense of history or
social or economic context. Experiments ‘with — and beyond — sex’ are
not new. Their fashion and visibility in the 1990s are shaped by factors
such as responses to the threat of AIDS, commercial imperatives, and
socio-economic developments which make possible the places and spaces
where such changes can happen for small numbers of people.
Experimentation with ‘the human organism and what it can do and feel’
has a long and terrible history, which has marked the very fantasies
which are claimed as liberatory. For chains and black leather to have
their power as sexual fetishes, they have to have been used in
non-fantasised, non-consenting situations. Subversion? Or is that claim
itself a fantasy of power and control, of imaginary freedoms unaffected
by social constraints?
Technological developments are accorded enormous power.

Virtual reality is a space that is neither real in the old sense nor is
it nothing nor is it fantasy…That alone is devastating to the whole
philosophical world view and undermines all the gender and power
relations.

In cyberspace, you can represent yourself as whatever gender, race, or
bodily conformation you choose, and engage in virtual encounters with
others who may be playing the same games. Sexualised interactions have
become common, and the first allegations of virtual adultery are about
to hit the divorce courts in the USA. Is this the imagination in power?
Yes, the internet can provide a space where people can experiment with
identities, fantasise other worlds and perhaps thereby change their own.
So can the printed word or traditional storytelling. Women, people
with disabilities, and black people using the internet have been
subjected to abuse and harassment. The fact that they could disguise
themselves, or that their abusers can, seems to miss the point, which is
that it is the imagined reality of the body which invites the
replication of off-line power relations. Whatever identity we construct
for ourselves on the net is rooted in what we understand ourselves and
others to be in the bodies hunched over the keyboard.

Liberatory Technologies?

The idea of the integrity of the human body, problematic though it is,
has been useful as a way of arguing against medical approaches which
treat the body as a collection of parts. Theories about the dissolution
of bodily boundaries look rather different from the perspective of
Indian peasants forced by poverty to sell their kidneys, working class
women in the United States acting as surrogate mothers for the rich, or
middle-aged women having unnecessary hysterectomies. Virtual reality is
hardly accessible to those whose labour in the other kind of reality
produces the raw material for the computers and the food for their
operators. No theory of the liberatory powers of technology can afford
to overlook or downplay the conditions of its production and
consumption.
This is more than a question of asking who gets left out or made
invisible in these imaginings of the future. There is also the point
that technology embodies social relations and would itself need to be
transformed as part of a wider process of social transformation. Too
often, new forms of technological and biological determinism are
masquerading as fluidity. If biology is not destiny, why do we need to
change our bodies with drugs or surgery, or pretend we have a different
one in cyberspace in order to challenge existing notions of sex and
gender? The idea that technology will do away with the social relations
which produce it is to look for a technological fix for problems which
need to be addressed in far more complex ways. The issue is not
technology on the one hand versus nature on the other. Where does the
technology come from? How are our understandings of it produced? Who
designed it, who made it, who uses it, what and who is excluded by it?
Fantasising about the future is itself an important kind of
prefiguration. If we want actively to transform the world, imagination
is crucial. But fantasies that deny the limitations of our bodies are
not transcending the Cartesian split between mind and body, they are
reinforcing it. Undermining existing power and gender relations needs
an understanding of the way they, too, are embedded in a material
reality which is all too resistant to our attempts to change it. What
will twenty-first century sex be like? I don’t know. The question is not
whether there is a true inner sexuality to be liberated, but which ways
of understanding ourselves make it possible to act with some chance of
bringing about positive changes. The dreams of the future are embedded
in the power relations of the present. A materialist, embodied anarchism
will try to encompass both.

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